1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to database systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for facilitating optimistic authorization in a database system.
2. Related Art
Transactions within a database often require authorization before they are allowed to proceed. Unless a user is in the rare situation of being the administrator and sole user of the database, several levels of security generally exist. These levels typically differ in the privileges they confer to the user. These privileges, in turn, restrict what types of transactions the user can and cannot execute.
In systems that require such authorizations for transactions to execute, the user's authorization level must first be determined in order to verify whether the database can honor the user's request to execute the transaction. Unfortunately, these security checks can incur a significant amount of overhead, and can thus greatly reduce the performance of a database system. Moreover, the added overhead can be especially high when security checks involve contacting remote services. Furthermore, auxiliary operations associated with the security checks, such as logging or auditing, can introduce yet even more overhead. Because of the overhead required to perform security checks, customers are often faced with a decision about whether to sacrifice either security or performance.
Past efforts to increase performance have typically focused on making security-related operations execute as fast as possible. Due to the inherent nature of security checks, overhead cannot easily be reduced without trivializing the security checks.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus that facilitates reducing the overhead involved in performing security checks while maintaining a high level of security.